The Final Set

The padel court sat empty beneath amber floodlights, the glass walls steamed with humidity. Elena stood at the net, her racquet dangling from her wrist like an afterthought. Behind her, Richard paced the baseline, his shadow elongating across the blue synthetic surface.

"The cable guy comes tomorrow," Richard said, not looking at her. "Finally."

Elena nodded. They'd been watching Netflix on his phone for two weeks, huddled together on opposite ends of the couch—a metaphor she'd been too cowardly to voice.

"Remember when we played baseball that summer?" she asked suddenly. "That beer league you joined?" The memory surfaced unbidden: Richard swinging at a pitch, missing spectacularly, then laughing so hard he'd fallen into the dirt. She'd loved him then. loved how he didn't take himself seriously, how joy seemed to spill out of him.

"That was three years ago, El."

"I know."

The silence between them stretched, taut as the cable that would somehow fix everything and nothing at all.

"My mother called," Elena said. "She asked if we're still coming for Christmas."

Richard stopped pacing. "What did you say?"

"I said I didn't know."

He walked toward the net, stopped on his side. They faced each other through the mesh, separated by twelve feet and three years of accumulated disappointments, small deaths that had somehow calcified into something resembling a life.

"I'm tired," Richard said quietly. "Aren't you?"

Elena's throat tightened. "Of what?"

"Everything. The pretending. The padel games we don't enjoy but keep playing because that's what couples do. The dinners where we talk about everything except what matters. The cable that's been cut for weeks because neither of us could be bothered to call."

"So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that baseball summer was the last time I remember us being happy. And I'm wondering if that's enough."